At least those on cover blurbs, as they are almost strictly marketing gimmicks. It's not a bad habit to get into to stop reading those after the synopsis and ignore all the hyperbolic recommendations and dubious comparisons... occasionally they are useful, but mostly when you get a second opinion from another source that isn't trying to sell you anything...

Then there are most mainstream reviews of the genre releases, where either the critic is clueless or the targeted readers are believed to be fairly clueless and dropping the name of Tolkien is a short-cut to explain "this is a Fantasy novel" (the chances that it turns out to be also a Fantasy epic with a central conflict of good vs. evil are far less good). Why? Because Tolkien/LOTR remains all too often the one Fantasy novel of which there is a certain awareness in the mainstream pop culture since the 70s. Few mainstream reviewers do their job right when it comes to genre, by summarizing the background of the genre or familiarizing their readers with a few of its currents or sub-genres instead of just dropping the name of Tolkien. It's only become worse because of the Jackson movies that have made LOTR massively more "mainstream" than it was before.

Expect the name of G.R.R. Martin to be used far more extensively in the mainstream media in the next years because of the HBO miniseries. Where some would have described as work as a modern Tolkien but "with more adult themes", they'll just drop the name of Martin instead. (Also, Martin is the big Fantasy name who gets the most laughably coined "a Tolkien". In his case, it really shows how blocked and lacking in background some reviewers are when it comes to genre works)

However, I think you've failed to notice that within the Fantasy circles themselves (incl. genre reviewers, and the publishers when they targeted the fans, not the mainstream readers) the name of Tolkien isn't used as widely as before. It was everywhere in the late 80s-early 90s, as post-Tolkien Fantasy was still in its emergence phase. Who in fact but Tolkien could be used as reference for marketing purposes, to define the genre of the work, when it came to writers like Robert Jordan back in 1990 anyway ?(and more precisely "an American Tolkien", to account for the americanity of Jordan's worldbuilding and referents, very apparent even in EOTW. Beside, it was relevant the time, if far less so today. Beyond offering a manichean tale built around a hero's journey like Tolkien Jordan was, and clearly inspired in this endeavour by Tolkien's, attempting to create a whole world to put his story in (and one that developped into something far more detailed if not as brilliant as Tolkien). Tolkien definitely didn't invent the hero's journey (no one did, as far back as we can go in the history of humanity it's been there) and he didn't invent world building either (though before him it had been used mostly either for religious or philosophical purposes, for example in utopian works, or differently in most religious texts from ancient myths to the more recent ones like the christian gospels) but without knowing he was founding a modern literary genre/sub-genre by integrating the two to create a fully fictitious epic, and one meant to be read for entertainment, not for social/political or religious or even educative purposes. What Tolkien invented is the idea of setting an epic on a purely faux-mythology/cosmology, which was quite a bit an accident as he had developped a fictional mythology first as an intellectual hobby, and what he set out to write as a sequel to the Hobbit ended up becoming the Heroic cycle to his unpublished mythological cycle.

It's not before the mid-90s that very different tone of WOT was firmly established and using Tolkien for reference wasn't nearly precise enough. It wasn't very apparent before the fourth or fifth WOT book that Jordan would start diverting from the classic epic à la Tolkien to create rather Fantasy's first pseudo-historical feuilleton, where the epic is just an important element, a kind of core, that would take the center stage once more mostly in the finale. Jordan's "historical events" are fictitious, and drawing from the epic and the manichean opposition core, but most of his series is more comparable to the tone and tropes of the historical feuilleton sub-genre, telling the tales of tons of characters while history develops in the background (a genre of which Alexandre Dumas remains the master). But after reading only his first book, Jordan could be seen quite accurately as a sub-Tolkien. Later it became apparent that Jordan had not intention to merely mimick Tolkien and write another LOTR (as several authors have tried to do) and but to write a series with a wholly different tone, style and focus, drawing on core elements that first appeared, in modern literature anyway, in LOTR. Martin later did the same. Erikson did the same. JK Rowling did the same, all in their different ways. Martin didn't borrow from feuilleton and adventure novels like Jordan, he focussed his series on a medieval-style war, with an epic core à la Tolkien that (like Jordan) will eventually provide him with a finale.

Nowadays, there's been enough big publishing successes and big fan successes, and the Fantasy genre has diversified enough that publishers can leave Tolkien mostly as a reference in the mainstream media, and use instead other, more precise comparisons (if all too often as misleading, shallow or reductive as before). Erikson was coined "a modern Tolkien" not because his work has much to do with LOTR (though he's probably the one who could be the most honestly considered an heir to Tolkien) but because like Tolkien he has a relevant scholarly background (not ancient languages, but anthropology), and was similarly inspired by the form, not only the content, of the ancient texts. And that was one factor that made me curious to read his work, as I told myself "hmmm... the worldbuilding in this series is bound to be solid and interesting if this guy can also write". Martin is all too often brought in when a publisher want to sell to the Fantasy fans it's dark, gritty and has sex, or when a series centers on a political plot, or even to suggest it's "more mature" than Tolkien and the others have been (which unsurprisngly is meant to sell the books mostly to young adult males, far more worried that a series isn't "too immature" for them than actual adult readers are). I've seen the name of Jordan used for marketing a lot too, the minute a writer tells the story of tons of characters in parallel, or plans for a very long series. Tor is already using Sanderson's "filiation" to Jordan to present his Stormlight Archives as "a huge saga in the vein of the Wheel of Time" (and fashionably throw in a "and ASOIAF", perhaps to convince readers who find Sanderson too squeaky-clean to give it a try) - which in this case is probably relevant. Anderson's Seven Suns series was also sold as "a saga in the vein of Jordan's WOT" which in that case was strictly a misleading marketing gimmick.

When Tolkien is thrown in nowadays, it's mostly when publishers are trying to sell a series to an audience beyond the genre fans, which is the case with Martin, coined "the American Tolkien" for the masses's sake. Regular fantasy readers know what that comment is worth to accurately describe ASOIAF.